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SO many modern mums are struggling to deal with their child­ren’s addiction to taking pictures of themselves.

Youngsters have always posed for pictures like these. What mum hasn’t got an ­embarrassing old school disco photo where she’s trying to look sexy?

But the fact that almost every youngster in the UK has access to a smartphone by age 12 means that 17million selfies are now uploaded every day in the UK – and 91 per cent of teens have put pictures of themselves on social networks.

While boys take selfies, they don’t rely on them as much as girls as a barometer of how attractive they are.

As the author of new book Girls, Uninterrupted: Steps For Building Stronger Girls in a Challenging World, my research found that selfies don’t just record our daughters’ behaviour. They also change it.

Girls uncertain of their place in a brutal classroom beauty contest, where pretty equals popular, use these images to try to feel better about themselves. Far from boosting confidence, by constantly comparing themselves to celebrities like Kim Kardashian – who has a book out next month of her favourite selfies – studies show they end up feeling worse.

Indeed, a recent study found the self-esteem of girls who spend a lot of time on social networks falls after seeing an endless parade of posed and perfected pictures of their pals.

Even when girls retouch their own images, their brains do not always compute that others are doing it too. They just think everyone is skinnier and more gorgeous than them.

I spoke to girls aged 11 and up who chase likes for their selfies but end up feeling like failures when they don’t get the approval they hoped. As Karen, 14, told me: “The whole point of it is to make everyone else jealous.”

It’s perhaps no surprise that it doesn’t take long for this ­obsession among our daughters to spill over into real life. One in seven plastic surgeons said they felt that patients comparing pictures of themselves to others on the web had made them dissatisfied enough to seek surgery.

Beyond that, there is the more serious risk that comes from young girls feeling that they have to live up to their oh-so-sexy online personas.

In a bid to get more likes and prop up fragile self-esteem, it does not take long for young girls to go down the route of posting more revealing photos long before they are mature enough to handle the consequences.

According to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, the sexier girls look in the pictures they post, the more likely they are to be targeted by online predators.

As a result, the number of men asking girls to live up to their image and perform sex acts online is growing all the time. In the most recent figures, there were 1145 cases of males approaching children after seeing self-posted web photos.

With girls so desperate to hear they are pretty in the online beauty pageant, there’s often not much flattery needed to get them engaging with webcam admirers.

■ Girls, Uninterrupted: Steps For Building Stronger Girls in a Challenging World by Tanith Carey, published by Icon, £7.99.

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